BrownSauce RDF Browser

HP Semantic Web Activity | Instructions | Download | Sourceforge Project

Introduction

BrownSauce is an attempt to write a generic RDF browser. It was written by Damian Steer whilst employed at HP Labs Bristol. BrownSauce is free software, released under a BSD style licence.

What does it do?

There is RDF data all over the place, in XML documents and sources like databases. Getting all that data is impractical, and would be unreadable (to say the least). So BrownSauce is an attempt to make something which can browse that information.

BrownSauce breaks the problem into two parts: coarse-graining (breaking the data down into usable chunks, like "information about person X") and aggregation (making those chunks from multiple sources). The first part is done, and users can browse more than one source using rdfs:seeAlso references. Aggregation is currently being worked on.

BrownSauce runs as a local http server, or can be added to a java web application server like Tomcat or Jetty. The current interface is HTML and can be styled using CSS (the HTML is marked up using classes relating to the RDF). Other interfaces should be simple to implement.

See the instructions for a demonstration and details on use.

Why the silly name?

I can't think of good names.
It's a reference to HotSauce, the MCF browser.
HP Sauce was taken.

Acknowledgements

BrownSauce would not be possible without the following:

Jena Semantic Web Toolkit: Used extensively in BrownSauce. Jena (binary) is included in the BrownSauce distribution.
Jetty: Why I didn't have to write an HTTP server. Part of Jetty (in binary form) is distributed with BrownSauce in accordance with the Jetty licence.

Damian Steer

Last modified: Mon Oct 28 15:24:23 GMT 2002